Realism and Idealism - Latin america and greece

In 1815 the United States emerged from the War of 1812 amid a burst of
nationalism and a sense of deep satisfaction from having faced England. On
the one hand, the war experience encouraged a pervading interest in the
future of the North American continent and a pride of distinctness and
separation from Europe's international politics. On the other hand,
it perpetuated a popular sensitivity to events abroad that repeatedly
reopened the realist-idealist debate in the United States. The immediate
postwar challenge to U.S. sentiment was Latin America's struggle
for independence from Spain. Determined to sever Europe's ties to
the New World in what they believed would be a triumph for humanity,
editors led by William Duane of Philadelphia's
Aurora
demanded U.S. guardianship of Latin American independence. In Congress,
the powerful Henry Clay denounced the administration of James Monroe, with
John Quincy Adams as secretary of state, for neglecting U.S. interests and
the cause of liberty in Latin America. Adams was appalled at the
widespread defiance of the official U.S. policy of neutrality.
"There seems to me," he complained in June 1816, "too
much of the warlike humor in the debates of Congress—propositions
even to take up the cause of the South Americans…, as if they were
talking of the expense of building a light house."

As the public pressure for involvement continued, Adams, in December 1817,
reminded his father, John Adams, that Latin America had replaced the
French Revolution as the great source of discord in the United States.
"The republican spirit of our country…sympathizes with
people struggling in a cause…. And now, as at the early stage of
the French Revolution, we have ardent spirits who are for rushing into the
conflict, without looking to the consequences." Monroe and Adams,
against mounting public and congressional pressures, sustained the
country's official neutrality until, in 1821, the striking
victories of the revolutionary forces all but destroyed Spain's
remaining authority in South America. In a special message to Congress on
8 March 1822, Monroe recognized the independence of Argentina, Peru,
Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

Already, a similar debate over the future of Greece had divided the Monroe
administration as well as much of the country. The Greek revolution had
gathered momentum until, by 1821, it posed an immediate threat to
Turkey's Ottoman rule. Turkish sultan Mahmud II retaliated against
the Greek revolutionaries with such violence that he aroused anti-Turkish
sentiment throughout western Europe and the United States. American
idealists took up the cause of the repressed Greeks even as Adams
expressed his total disapproval of foreign crusades. In his famed speech
of 4 July 1821, Adams declared that the United States "goes not
abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the
freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only
of her own." Monroe expressed regret over Turkey's despotic
rule in his annual message of December 1822. Then, in 1823, Edward
Everett, professor of Greek at Harvard, championed Greece's
independence in a long essay that appeared in the
North American Review,
a journal that he edited. Adams was not impressed and argued strongly
against any U.S. meddling in the affairs of Greece and Turkey, especially
since the country was not prepared financially or militarily to intervene.

In January 1824, Adams's allies in Congress disposed of the Greek
issue. Among Everett's converts was Daniel Webster, then a U.S.
representative from Massachusetts. In December 1823, Webster introduced a
resolution into the House that provided for defraying the expense of an
agent or commissioner to Greece, whenever the president might deem such an
appointment expedient. On 19 January 1824, while discussing this
apparently noncommittal text, Webster launched into an eloquent appeal to
American humanitarian sentiment. The Greeks, he said, look to "the
great Republic of the earth—and they ask us by our common faith,
whether we can forget that they are struggling, as we once struggled, for
what we now so happily enjoy?" He asked nothing of Congress.
Previously, he acknowledged, "there was no making an impression on
a nation but by bayonets, and subsidies, by fleets and armies;
but…there is a force in public opinion which, in the long run, will
outweigh all the physical force that can be brought to oppose it….
Let us direct the force, the vast moral force of this engine, to the aid
of others."

In his reply on 24 January, Randolph challenged Webster's effort to
commit the country abroad to what it could not accomplish, except at
enormous cost to its own interests. How, Randolph wondered, would the
United States operate effectively in a country as distant as Greece?
"Do gentlemen seriously reflect," he asked, "on the
work they have cut out for us? Why, sir, these projects of ambition
surpass those of Bonaparte himself." Finally, Randolph attacked the
resolution itself:

We are absolutely combatting shadows. The gentleman would have us to
believe his resolution is all but nothing; yet again it is to prove
omnipotent, and fills the whole globe with its influence. Either it is
nothing, or it is something. If it is nothing, let us lay it on the
table, and have done with it at once; but, if it is that something which
it has been on the other hand represented to be, let us beware how we
touch it. For my part, I would sooner put the shirt of Nessus on my
back, than sanction these doctrines.

Such argumentation, much to Adams's delight, eliminated the issue
of Greek independence from the nation's consideration.